Finally, the mortician came back and flashed him that closed-lipped professional smile, no hint of teeth. Pleasure was not a factor here. He asked Reeve to follow him through a set of double doors, which had glass panes covered with more cream satin material. All the colors were muted. In fact, the most colorful thing in the place was James Reeve’s face.
There was a single open coffin in the room, lined, naturally, with cream satin. It stood on trestles at the end of the red-carpeted walkway. The corpse was dressed only in a shroud, which made it look bizarrely feminine. The shroud came up over the corpse’s scalp. Reeve knew his brother had swallowed the Browning, angling it up towards the brain, so probably there wouldn’t be much scalp there.
They’d given James’s face the only tan, fake or otherwise, of its life, and there looked like rouge on the cheeks, maybe a little coloring on the thick, pale lips. He looked absurd, like a waxwork dummy. But it was him all right. Reeve had been hoping for a fake, a monstrous practical joke. Maybe Jim was in trouble, he’d thought, had run off, and had somehow duped everybody into thinking he’d killed himself. But now there could be no doubt. Reeve nodded his head and turned away from the coffin. He’d seen enough.
“We have some effects,” the mortician whispered.
“Effects?” Reeve kept walking. He didn’t want to be in the viewing room a second longer. He was angry. He didn’t know why, perhaps because it was more natural to him than grief. He screwed his eyes shut, wishing the mortician would stop whispering at him.
“Effects of your brother’s. Just clothes, really, the ones he was wearing…”
“Burn them.”
“Of course. There are also some papers to sign.”
“I just need a minute.”
“Of course. It’s only natural.”
Reeve turned on the man. “No,” he snarled, “it’s highly unnatural, but I need that minute anyway. Okay?”
The man went paler than his surroundings. “Why… uh, of course.” Then he walked back into the viewing room, and seemed to count to sixty before coming out again, by which time Reeve had recovered some of his composure. The pink mist was shifting from in front of his eyes. Jesus, and his pills were back in Scotland.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Quite…” The man swallowed back the word natural, and coughed instead. “Quite understandable. When will you want the body released?”
That had been taken care of. The coffin would travel to Heathrow on the same flight Reeve himself was taking, then be transported to the family plot in Scotland. It all seemed so ludicrous-burying a brother, traveling thousands of miles with the physical remains. How would Jim have felt? Suddenly Reeve knew exactly what his brother would have wanted.
“Look,” he said in the vestibule, “is there any way he can be buried here?”
The mortician blinked. “In La Jolla?”
“Or San Diego.”
“You don’t want to take the remains back?”
“Back where? He left Scotland a long time ago. Wherever he was at any given point, that was his home. He’d be as well off here as anywhere.”
“Well, I’m sure we could… burial or cremation?”
Cremation: the purifying fire. “Cremation would be fine.”
So they went through to the office to fix everything, including the expenses to date. Reeve used his credit card. There were forms to sign, a lot of forms. A bell sounded, signaling that someone else had come in. The mortician went to his office door and looked out.
“I’ll be just one moment,” he called, “if you’d take a seat…”
Then he came back to his desk and was briskly businesslike. First, he got the details from Reeve and canceled the cargo reservation from LAX to LHR. He called the transport company in England, and caught someone just as they were about to leave for the night, so was able to cancel that, too. Reeve said he could take care of the rest when he got back to Scotland. The mortician was obviously used to having to do these things, or things like them. He smiled again and nodded.
Setting up the cremation was like setting up a dental appointment. Would he want the ashes in an urn, or scattered? Reeve said he’d want them scattered to the four winds, and let them blow where they may. The mortician checked the paperwork, and that was that.
Plastic made these financial transactions so much easier.
The mortician handed over a clear cellophane bag-Jim’s effects.
They shook hands in the vestibule. Reeve noticed that the new client wasn’t anywhere to be seen, then just as he was leaving, the double doors to the viewing room opened and the man came out.
He was broad across the chest and neck, with legs that tapered to pencil-thin ankles. Reeve ignored him and stepped outside, then hugged the wall beside the door. He looked along the street, and there was the green car, not twenty feet from him. It was an old Buick. He was still standing to one side of the door sixty seconds later when the man came out. Reeve grabbed for a hand, wrenched it up the man’s back, and marched him across the pavement to the car, where he slammed him onto the hood.
The man made complaining noises throughout, even as Reeve started searching his jacket pockets. Then he made out a few words, punctuated by gasps of pain.
“Friend… his friend… Jim’s… your brother’s.”
Reeve eased the pressure on the arm. “What?”
“I was a friend of your brother’s,” the man said. “Name’s Eddie Cantona. Maybe he mentioned me.”
Reeve let the man’s hand go. Eddie Cantona lifted himself slowly from the hood, as though checking the damage-to both himself and the car.
“How do you know who I am?”
Cantona turned towards him and started rubbing his elbow and wrist. “You look like him,” he said simply.
“What were you doing out at La Jolla?”
“You saw me, huh?” Cantona kept manipulating his arm. “Some gumshoe I’d make. What was I doing?” He rested his bulk against the wheel well. “Same as you, I guess. Trying to make sense out of it.”
“And did you?”
Cantona shook his head. “No, sir, I didn’t. There’s only one thing I know for damned sure: Jim didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”
Reeve stared at the stranger, and Cantona returned the look without blinking.
“I liked your brother a hell of a lot,” he said. “Soon as I saw you, I knew who you were. He mentioned you to me, said he wished you could’ve been closer. He was mostly drunk when he talked, but they say drunk men speak the truth.”
The words rolled out like they’d been rehearsed. This was what Reeve wanted, someone who had known Jim towards the end, someone who might help him make sense of it all. But what had Cantona said…?
“What makes you think,” Reeve said slowly, “my brother was murdered?”
“Because he’d no need to rent a car,” Eddie Cantona said. “I was his driver.”
They sat in a bar two blocks from the funeral parlor, and Reeve told Cantona what McCluskey had told him-how suicides like to make a break.
“If he was going to commit suicide, he wouldn’t‘ve wanted to do it in your car,” Reeve said.
“Well, all I know is, he didn’t kill himself.” Cantona shot back his second Jose Cuervo Gold and sipped from his iced glass of beer.
Reeve nursed his orange juice. “Have you talked to the police?”
“Sure, soon as I heard about it on the news. That fellow you were with, McCluskey, he took a sort of statement from me. Leastways, he listened to what I had to say. Then he said I could go, and that was the end of it, haven’t heard from the police since. Tried phoning a couple of times, but I never catch him.”